If fly-fishing is a way for people to tune in to their passion, then the fly rod is their antenna. Cane rods connect people to the river like no other material can. This film shows not only how a bamboo fly-rod is created, but why. Starting in the bamboo forests of Southern China, we watch as 30' bamboo culms are harvested, slid down hillsides, loaded onto primitive wooden carts and transported to the roads or rivers below. Witness one of the legends of the craft, Mr. Hoagy B. Carmichael, as he visits for the first time, the land that served as the origin of his seminal book on bamboo rod construction (A Master's Guide to Building a Bamboo Flyrod written in 1973 with Everett Garrison). Learn what is needed in a piece of bamboo that will be transformed from a $10 piece of grass into a $1,500 lightening rod. From the misty hillsides of China into the dusty confines of a workshop in Montana...

Starring:

David James Duncan, Hoagy Carmichael II, Thomas McGuane

Genre:

Documentary